The Skin by Curzio Malaparte Read Free Book Online Page A

he had never been to Italy. He had landed at Salerno on September 9th, 1943, from the deck of an L.S.T.—a landing-barge—amid the din and smoke of the explosions and the hoarse cries of the soldiers as they hobbled rapidly across the sands of Paestum under the fire of German machine-guns. In his ideal Cartesian Europe, the alte Kontinent of Goethe, governed by mind and reason, Italy was still the land of his beloved Virgil and Horace. It suggested to his imagination the placid green and blue panorama of his own Virginia, where he had completed his studies and spent the better part of his life, and where he had his home, his family and his books. In the Italy of his heart the peristyles of the Georgian houses of Virginia and the marble columns of the Forum, Vermont Hill and the Palatine combined in his mind's eye to form a familiar scene, in which the brilliant green of the fields and woods blended with the brilliant white of the marble under a limpid blue sky like that which stretches in an arch above the Capitol.
    When, at dawn on September 9th, 1943, Jack had leapt from the deck of an L.S.T. on to the beach at Paestum, near Salerno, he had seen a wonderful vision rising before his eyes through the red cloud of dust thrown up by the caterpillars of the tanks, the explosions of the German grenades and the tumult of the men and machines hurrying up from the sea. On the edge of a plain thickly covered with myrtles and cypresses, to which the bare mountains of Cilento, so like the mountains of Latium, provide a background, he had seemed to see the columns of the Temple of Neptune. Ah, this was Italy, the Italy of Virgil, the Italy of Aeneas! And he had wept for joy, he had wept with religious emotion, throwing himself on his knees upon the sandy shores, as Aeneas had done when he landed from the Trojan trireme on the sandy beach at the mouth of the Tiber, opposite the mountains of Latium, with their sprinkling of castles and white temples set amid the deep green of the ancient Latin woods.
    But the classical setting of the Doric columns of the temples of Paestum concealed from his eyes a secret, mysterious Italy. It concealed Naples, that terrible, wonderful prototype of an unknown Europe, situated outside the realm of Cartesian logic—that other Europe of whose existence he had until that day had only a vague suspicion, and whose mysteries and secrets, now that he was gradually probing them, filled him with a wondrous terror.
    "Naples," I told him, "is the most mysterious city in Europe. It is the only city of the ancient world that has not perished like Ilium, Nineveh and Babylon. It is the only city in the world that did not founder in the colossal shipwreck of ancient civilization. Naples is a Pompeii which was never buried. It is not a city: it is a world— the ancient, pre-Christian world—that has survived intact on the surface of the modern world. You could not have chosen a more dangerous place than Naples for a landing in Europe. Your tanks run the risk of being swallowed up in the black slime of antiquity, as in a quicksand. If you had landed in Belgium, Holland, Denmark or even in France, your scientific spirit, your technical knowledge, your vast wealth of material resources might have given you victory not merely over the German Army, but over the very spirit of Europe —that other, secret Europe of which Naples is the mysterious image, the naked ghost. But here in Naples your tanks, your guns, your machines provoke a smile. They are scrap-iron. Jack, do you remember the words of the Neapolitan who, on the day you entered Naples, was watching your endless columns of tanks passing along Via Toledo? 'What beautiful rust!' Here, your particular American brand of humanity stands revealed in all its nakedness—defenceless, dangerously vulnerable. You are only big boys, Jack. You cannot understand Naples, you will never understand Naples."
    "Je crois," said Jack, "que Naples n'est pas impénétrable a la raison.